Reading Raspberry Pi chip temperature with mainline Linux kernel

This tutorial is based on a previous article where we installed pure Debian 9 with a recent mainline/vanilla Linux kernel on a Raspberry Pi, and so differs from what would be done on a Raspbian Distribution with a Raspbian kernel. In this article, we will read the Raspberry Pi chip temperature. Here is my previous article:

As of mainline Linux Kernel 4.9.0-rc3, the sysfs entry
/sys/class/thermal for the Broadcom BCM283x chip found on Raspberry Pi’s is empty. You can apply the following patch to Linux kernel 4.9.0-rc3, even though it will soon be superfluous because it seems that currently there is ongoing work by Linux Kernel developers to add in the missing functionalities.

The patch which will get you the standard sysfs temperature node which you can read like this:

Shell

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cat/sys/class/thermal/thermal_zone0/temp

40084

This is the chip temperature in thousandths of degrees cenigrade, i.e. 40.084 degrees Celsius.

The following patch will give you a new entry in the mainline Kernel config, under Drivers -> SoC -> BCM -> Raspberry Pi thermal sysfs driver, which you have to enable, then recompile your kernel.

I have actually submitted this patch to a Linux kernel developer, but the process to get code into the Linux kernel is quite elaborate, and he said that they are already working on it, so I let it drop and decided to write this blog post instead.